gracchusdixit

Now that our military involvement in Iraq is all but done and our engagement in Afghanistan is finally winding down, there is much talk from the chattering classes about what can be learned from these experiences.  The pundits have precious little to say, however, about what may be the most important lesson of all—the jarring contradiction between the power we think we have and the power we actually have.

The United States of America likes to think of itself as being militarily preeminent, even unstoppable—or as some have put it, “the only remaining superpower on the planet.”  Because of this self-perception, we are routinely tempted to use military force to solve problems that might (and usually could) be dealt with in more effective and less costly ways.

There is, of course, a certain quantitative reality to this self-perception.  We spend as much on guns, ships, planes, and bombs as the rest of the world put together, and our expensively acquired military technology is generally one step ahead of that of other nations.  But what has this vast expenditure purchased?

Despite our enormous and undeniable material advantages, the military record of the United States is abysmal.  It would seem that we can push around small and militarily laughable nations like Guatemala or Panama but cannot prevail against more formidable adversaries.  Indeed, one has to wonder whether the military establishment of the United States, no matter how much money we spend on it, is able to win a major war.

Consider the facts:

World War II is the principal source of our self-image as a great military power, but the part we played in that conflict was less decisive than we like to think.  The British, let us remember, fought alone for two years, helped by our materiel but not by our direct involvement.  When we did finally enter the war, it was the Russians who did the bloodiest work and suffered infinitely greater casualties.  Without them, we might well have overcome the Japanese, but we never would have defeated the German army, which was better trained and better led.

The “police action” we now call the Korean War was a costly draw that produced no clear victory for either side.  The divided Korea it left behind is still divided, more than half a century later.  There were those at the time who said that the United States could have prevailed had “the politicians in Washington” let Douglas MacArthur have his way, by using nuclear weapons against the Chinese.  We will never know—thank God.  What we do know is that American forces did not win the war.  Nobody did.

Then, there was the unmitigated disaster of Vietnam, perhaps the most terrible of the many wars we did not need to fight.  Again, there were those who said (there are those who still say) that we could have prevailed had the generals been unleashed.  The truth is that those generals were given plenty of leash: napalm, Agent Orange, carpet bombing, and half a million men, 50,000 of whom never came home.  We still lost.

Which brings us to Iraq and Afghanistan.  No matter what Dick Cheney and co-conspirators may wish posterity to believe, in neither case can it be said that anything  lasting or substantial has been accomplished.  We invaded Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction that did not exist.  We toppled Sadam Hussein in less than ten days but spent more than ten years trying, without result, to end the chaos we had unleashed.  We invaded Afghanistan to apprehend the perpetrators of the attack on the World Trade Center and to eradicate their supporters.  It took us a decade to find Bin Laden—ensconced comfortably in a villa in Pakistan, not in the wilds of the Hindu Kush.  Today, as we sneak away, the Taliban are stronger than ever, and the government in Kabul feels free to insult us all the while it takes our money.

In truth, after the surrender of Japan, the only major military conflict waged with unmitigated success by American forces was the Gulf War of 1991.

This is neither a glorious nor a comforting record.

Perhaps the lesson we should learn from such a record is this:  Don’t pick fights you can’t win, and if you’re not very good at winning fights, don’t pick them at all.